


Shifts in Velocity

by SincerelyChaos



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Character Development, Developing Relationship, Hospitalization, M/M, Past Drug Use, Sexual Content, Suicidal Thoughts, ambiguous consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 16:56:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4674323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SincerelyChaos/pseuds/SincerelyChaos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The pills are round, cream colored and have letters and numbers imprinted on one side.</p><p>He prefers to think of them as <i>3,5-diamino-6-(2,3-dichlorophenyl)-as-triazine</i>, because it’s all just chemistry and chemistry is never personal, not the way psychotropic drugs are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shifts in Velocity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pennypaperbrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennypaperbrain/gifts).



> A story written for pennypaperbrain's birthday a few days ago. This was supposed to be a ficlet, but as usual, things got a bit out of hand...
> 
> My English in this has been remarkably improved by the excellent beta by hubblegleeflower.
> 
> Happy birthday, Penny! 
> 
> (Here's to some of those things for which one can hold a rather disreputable interest...)

 

 

“You shouldn’t spend so much time thinking, Sherlock.”

Even at age eleven Sherlock recognises that his aunt’s advice is utter rubbish. ‘Thinking’ is not something that he can chose not to do, even if that seems to come naturally to everyone around him.

“That’s why you get so troubled, you know. Do something fun instead. Why don’t you go play with your cousins, love?”

 

*

 

When Sherlock is thirteen his violin teacher calls his father to express her concern for Sherlock. Apparently his sudden loss of interest in the instrument is ‘uncharacteristic’ and ‘a cause for concern’.

“I hear what you’re saying, Martha. – Yes, I know. – He’s a teenager. It’s just the hormones, they all get moody and irritable at that age, don’t they? – No, he’s been like this before, he always snaps out of it after a while. He’ll grow out of it. – I’ll inform him of that, yes. Should we pause the lessons for a week, then?”

Sherlock hears his father put the phone down and make his way back to his study.

It’s convenient to attribute everything to age, because that means that the problem will sort itself out.

(Sherlock is rather certain that it won’t.)

 

*

 

“Slow down, I can’t hear what you’re saying when you’re talking like this,” his lab partner finally snaps after Sherlock’s attempted to make him see how this experiment could be altered in five different ways and still have the same outcome.

Trying to make his words slow enough for his idiot classmate, Sherlock clenches his fists to hide his frustration over how people constantly fail to see that you need to adjust to the changes in velocity that occur sometimes. Right now time is rapid and slippery and Sherlock’s mind is in sync with it - crystal sharp and accelerating.

Perhaps it was the hormones that were the problem after all. Because he’s a bit older now and things are finally looking up for him. Sherlock’s fourteen years old and feels almost weightless for the first time in his life. At first it’s crystalised and clear, but then the motion blur makes everything a bit hazy around the edges and it’s insufferable and brilliant at the same time.

“Are you doing drugs?” someone asks, but they ask it in ultra rapid, which is insipid, and Sherlock loses interest in the conversation before the question is even completed.

 

*

 

Nobody asks him about drugs three weeks later when he’s surrounded by dozens of abandoned, ambitious experiments that he doesn’t really remember starting. His room is dim from the drawn curtains and there’s no need to open them, because time is once again stale and slow.

 

*

 

When Sherlock turns nineteen he begins to realise that these rapid alterations of velocity is not something that everyone experiences. But at this point he’s already accustomed to the fact that most people don’t experience anything the way he does, so it still doesn’t strike him as something out of the ordinary. Nothing out of _his_ ordinary.

 

*

 

Sherlock is twenty-three when he’s sectioned and ends up in a mental facility for the first time.

It seems fitting, somehow, that the hospital walls are peeling. The passage of time leaving concrete grey flaws in the endless dirt-yellow of the walls. It can’t be a coincidence.

( _The universe is rarely so lazy, brother mine_.)

There are different ways to be self-destructive, but some are more accepted than others. Running unprotected into abandoned warehouses while chasing three armed smugglers might be considered merely ‘idiotic’, but risking your life in the absence of (external) danger is apparently defined as ‘severe mental illness’ in the eyes of the law. It’s illogical really, to have different names for the same thing.

 

One slip or careless redistribution of weight and the decision will be made for you. To balance on the edge of something palpable - _you can see London from above and it makes for a pretty sight even if your mind has been numbed for too long for you to really notice such things_ - instead of balancing on the edge of something more nebulous.

 

Sherlock’s roommate is clinically insane and stacks the plastic cutlery stolen from the laminate trays in the lunch area under his mattress just so no one else will get hold of them and use them to kill him. Sherlock finds it more plausible that his roommate would hurt himself than that someone else would bother to, but doesn’t air these thoughts, because talking is really too much of an effort, and in the end it doesn’t matter either way – they’re all going to die and decompose and it will be a relief, really.

It should be insulting to be bundled together like this with people who seem to have lost their grip on reality, while you happen to see what the world really looks like and just react accordingly.

(It’s not worth trying to ‘get better’ – _there’s nothing for it_ – you might fool yourself temporarily but you know illusions won’t hold up long when you’re cursed with an intellect superior to almost everyone.)

For some reason, Sherlock doesn’t find his temporary accommodation to be as insulting as he ought to. At least his roommate is delusional in a more divergent way than all the endless people out there who thinks that their lives matter.

 

*

 

There is a series of predictable forms and then some interviews with a disinterested psychiatrist whose porn addiction is evident from the way she closes down her computer instantly once Sherlock starts pacing in her office, but she’s not fast enough. By the time she’s ready to present him with the result he’s already figured it out out himself.

 “So when we put together the results from the self-evaluation forms and the–” the woman in front of him begins, faking genuine interest with rather mediocre success.

 “Diagnostic code F31,” Sherlock interrupts. “Bipolar affective disorder.”

The surprise and irritation in her voice is, however, genuine as she asks how he knew that.

“Predictable,” he simply says, getting up from his chair and leaving her and the assessment of his mental health behind a cheap, wooden door with easily picked locks.

 

*

 

While it’s quite disturbing to be assessed as ‘mentally ill’, Sherlock still finds some sort of alleviation in the fact that his mercury moods have a diagnostic code. It’s clinical and disengaged from his personality and his intellect in a way that ‘being oversensitive’ or ‘having moods’ never were.

 

*

 

The next morning he’s informed that they’ll offer him a new medication that is likely to manage his symptoms to a degree where he can function ‘normally’ as long as he continues to take it. 

Sherlock knows that it’s highly unlikely that he’ll ever function ‘normally’. He also has no desire to do so. Normality is nothing he’s familiar with, and what he’s seen of it when observing others hasn’t made it tempting in the least.

Still. He takes the offered pills.

In three weeks he regains energy enough to pretend that he feels better.

 (He won’t say that he actually does, because it’s all still pointless, but he seems to spend less time thinking about dying, so at least his mind has room for other thoughts.)

 

*

 

He stops taking his medication as soon as he leaves the mental facility, because his mind feels like it’s wrapped in cotton candy and if that is the alternative to racing, distorted thoughts and the grey surge that makes him see reality for what it really is, then he would rather take the moods, because at least those are not constant the way the side-effects of the drug are.

 

*

 

At age twenty-five Sherlock goes through another shift. The velocity is now tuned up to eleven and Sherlock rapidly collects five different private debts, lab equipment that won’t even fit into his little flat at Montague street, one ASBO and one STD. For some reason he also finds that his neighbours won’t speak to him after that. Immediately afterwards, time shifts to a pace so slow that it could almost have gone backwards.

After a few weeks of sleeping a lot and doing very thorough studies of his gritty ceiling Sherlock finds himself in front of another psychiatrist. This time as a voluntary out-patient, which surprises both Sherlock and his family.

The doctor is trained in the US and informs him that according to the diagnostic manual used overseas, Sherlock would not only be bipolar; he would more specifically be bipolar type II, a diagnosis not commonly used in the UK. It’s always important to be specific, Sherlock knows, but is not otherwise certain what to do with this information.

 “Perhaps that’s why the lithium didn’t work for you, perhaps you would be willing to give something else a try?”

Sherlock hasn’t been able to work on his experiments or his small private cases for over three months. He finds himself bored and indifferent enough to agree to new medications. 

After two weeks he quits the Zyprexa, appalled over the constant tiredness and the fact that he, for the first time in his life, feels something that is close to hunger several times a day.

 

*

 

During the next three years Sherlock finds himself testing two other medications. One instantly gave him tremors and highly distracting involuntary eye movements. The other one seemed very promising at first, but later turned out to be problematic in the sense that it was somewhat addictive and that cocaine use is generally frowned upon when you’ve just got involved with helping the police in a few minor cases. And rehab was… not worth it.

 

*

 

Sherlock is twenty-eight years old when he first finds a chemical compound that is both NHS approved and seems to be relatively compatible with his own neurochemistry.

It allows him to function without dulling his mind the way previous chemical remedies have done and it does take the edge off both the lows and the highs (even if that last part is somewhat regrettable at times).

The pills are round, cream colored and have letters and numbers imprinted on one side.

He prefers to think of them as _3,5-diamino-6-(2,3-dichlorophenyl)-as-triazine_ , because it’s all just chemistry and chemistry is never personal, not the way psychotropic drugs are.

Sherlock swallows them down with coffee twice a day and allows himself to forget about their existence the rest of the time.

 

*

 

Seven weeks after Sherlock himself found a flatmate and moved into 221B Baker Street he begins to see the signs of the velocity beginning to shift. Within a week everything is slow and heavy and John doesn’t seem to believe him fully when he blames boredom.

The pills will ensure that the velocity doesn’t turn into ultra rapid, but the shifts are still noticeable. The weightless shifts are regrettably short and far less intense and the slow shifts now seem to have a floor instead of being a bottomless pit.

John doesn’t say anything when he walks in on Sherlock taking his pills a few weeks later.

Perhaps they passed for vitamins.

 

*

 

At thirty-four, Sherlock realises that he might have fallen victim to another chemical defect. The cause of it is his best friend, who manages to be simultaneously idiotic, not boring, useful, irritating and more than a bit distracting. The combination should be unbareable.

(It isn’t.)

A few weeks before he turn thirty-five, Sherlock finds himself in a relationship. It’s the first one he’s ever been in and he has no doubt that it will also be the last. John can kill a man without a second’s hesitation, doesn’t ever say no to danger, is quite skilled at fellatio, will stand up to Mycroft, can trick Sherlock into laughing even when he’s supposed to be sulking and is just as rubbish at talking about feelings as Sherlock himself.

Sherlock despises ‘hope’ in all forms, can’t stand the anticipation, but he finds that the future looks somewhat more promising than it did two years ago.

 

*

 

“Are you sure that this is a good time?”

“Don’t be boring, it doesn’t suit you,” Sherlock snaps back, and John looks at him for a few seconds before he nods and heads for the bedroom.

John refuses to fuck him hard or beat him up whenever it becomes apparent that he’s in one of his ‘moods’. It’s frustrating, really, so Sherlock learns how to hide the first symptoms of a shift.  The problem is that it’s usually only in the shifts Sherlock’s this eager for pain, and unfortunately John learns to pick up on that too, which is troublesome but intriguing all at once. He could still have other kinds of sex, but that’s not really what he needs when it’s like this. He knows that John still has some doubt about hurting him, even if it is at Sherlock's own request and terms. It had taken Sherlock several weeks to first convince John to use the infamous riding crop in addition to his hand when Sherlock wanted pain and instead of thoughts. He knows that this part of their sex life is more on his terms than John's, but his more recent deductions clearly indicates that John's beginning to enjoy this part too.

Half an hour later Sherlock fails to stop himself from crying out as the riding crop hits his thigh for the seventeenth time. His mind is blissfully unaware of anything except the pain radiating and the unpredictability of John’s movements.

Being beaten with a riding crop doesn’t really change anything, but sometimes it offers him a temporary relief from the noise in his mind. And even at the times when he has no desire for the sexual act in itself Sherlock finds the pain and the focus useful. It’s distracting in the most palpable way and it’s nothing like nebulous moods and shifts in velocity.

 It’s not a NHS approved additional treatment option for bipolar disorder, but Sherlock finds that it can sometimes be rather effective - at least temporarily - and it has comparatively few side-effects.

 

*

 

It’s early morning and John steals the last spring roll from Sherlock’s plate. He’s rewarded by having his tea confiscated by Sherlock, who gulps it down fast enough to choke on it. John grins and Sherlock just grunts, his face uncomfortably warm from coughing.

They should probably be asleep, but the adrenaline from the case they solved just a few hours ago is still in their blood and late night talk shows and leftovers seemed a much more appealing option. They can sleep later in the morning. They’ve got nothing on yet, and it’s a bit boring, really, but the case was a seven with a twist (the victim actually did it) so perhaps the next day will be tolerable. Everything is a bit heavier than usual at the moment, but the case offered a respite and Sherlock is not certain if the heaviness will transform into a more constant slowness this time.

Perhaps. Then again perhaps not.

Sherlock is thirty-four years old and has not been balancing on any bridge railings for seven years. He’s no less prone to shifts than he was a few years back, but they seem to have a shorter duration now. John puts up with some of his ‘moods’ and scolds him for some. At times they fight about it, because John seems to think that regular sleep and nutritional intake would lessen his shifts. Technically he might be right, but Sherlock adjusts his deficiency chemically by taking two pills a day and staying off drugs. That is as far as he will go in order to accommodate something he didn’t chose for himself.

John slumps down further in the sofa and Sherlock can tell by his breathing that it won’t be long before he falls asleep. His back won’t put up with several hours in an old sofa, so Sherlock nudges him to get up and they both get ready for bed.

Trying not to think is not an option any more than it was when he was eleven, so when John falls asleep Sherlock doesn’t attempt to empty his mind. There are other ways to keep the heavier thoughts at bay. Redirecting. Sherlock can use his ability to think in order to avoid thinking about things that will doubtless speed up the process of falling into a heavy mood. He can walk the corridors of his mind palace instead of flawed dirt-yellow institution corridors and he can think about cases and compositions instead of trying to find a meaning in it all.

 

( _‘Meaning’ has always been a far too vague concept anyway_.)

 

 

 


End file.
